Every Other Freckle
by Shun Ren Dan
Summary: Chemistry is a subject that Warren knows well, no matter what timeline he's in. That's probably why he ended up tutoring some Vortex Club freak and about the way he ended up in her bed on Christmas Eve.


Warren was pretty sure that he recognized her from somewhere. He wanted to say that she was in his Chem Lab that semester, but he wasn't certain. Maybe she was just one of those irritatingly uncommon people that looked familiar enough to draw a person in, only to be a total stranger once you got there. He wasn't sure how he felt about that, but there was enough uncertainty in it that he wasn't going to have any part of it. Still, he found himself staring back, pulled in like the tide to the shore.

She was normal looking enough.

Doe brown hair, the same color as dirty dishwater, with big eyes that pooled the world in their cores; the name came to him before he could stop himself.

"Maxine Caulfield," he muttered, shaking his head.

"What's she got to do with the Physics Review?"

Stella, who'd been buried in her textbook somewhere behind him, finally looked up for long enough to question her boyfriend's obviously misplaced priorities. Warren spared her a glance over his shoulder and shrugged, nodding in the Caulfield girl's direction a second later. It was pretty obvious that she was staring right at him. Stella frowned (he didn't have to look back at her to know that) and closed her book on her lap. She wasn't happy with either of them, apparently.

"Why's she staring at you, Warren?"

"I dunno," he said, tersely. If he knew, he probably wouldn't have been staring back. He'd been wondering the same thing for the last four minutes. "If I knew, I'd probably say something about it."

"You should say something about it anyway," Stella replied, irritation pinging deep in her voice. "Freaks like her shouldn't be staring at you."

Warren pondered this a second and stood up from his place on the grass. A black and white photograph of Mark Jefferson loomed behind him, advertising the next student contest. Maxine looked away, quickly, her cheeks flushed, and tried to bury her attention back in the conversation that she and her Vortex Club posse were having. Warren could count them all on his fingers, even if he couldn't see the entire inner circle sitting around her. There was Nathan Prescott, the strung out stoner who had a habit of buying too much weed, Victoria Chase, his girlfriend, and... well, he didn't need to know anyone else's name.

They were dicks and stoner freaks, all of 'em.

He still remembered Prescott's friends beaning Alyssa with a football earlier in the week, as if they owned the quad. Sure, Prescott's dad sponsored the dorm, but that didn't give him the right to be a huge cock about it.

Warren heard Stella stand up behind him and stuff her things into her bag. She was probably hoping that he was going to go chase the Caulfield girl down or something. Instead, Warren went ahead and slung his backpack over his shoulder and strode toward Blackwell's main entrance. He wasn't going to deal with some weirdo stripping him in her head for the next hour of studying.

"Let's go," he muttered. "If the Vortex Club wants to stare me down all day, they can stare me down in the library."

"I don't think they'd even know where to find it, Warren," Stella said, hurrying along behind him.

"Yeah, me neither."

* * *

As it turned out, at least two of the Vortex Club's main posse _did_ manage to track the library down. Of course it took them about an hour, but it was no less disappointing. Stella was already gone by the time Maxine Caulfield and Victoria Chase walked in, looking significantly bedraggled.

Chase went straight to the librarian, an old woman named Mrs. Welker that probably hadn't left the library in the last ten years, while Caulfield slowly strode over toward his table. Warren glanced up from his book every few seconds to make sure he wasn't imagining it. Maybe, he figured, she'd even back off once she saw that he saw her coming. He felt a twinge of disappointment when she didn't turn tail and run back out the double doors, but he understood that she was obviously performing some act of bravery by approaching him.

He could see the fear in her eyes, and somehow, it excited him. Not in the sexual way, but in the means that he understood he had something over her that she couldn't place. She was approaching him out of a need, for something, for some reason.

"Have we met?"

The words left his mouth as soon as she took her seat across from him, her lips drawn across her face in a thin line that made her look more like a sad ghost than a person. Then again, her clothes probably helped with that too. She wore a huge, flannel jacket that must've been at least two sizes too big for her and kept looking at the table while she mustered up something to say.

"Er, yeah," she mumbled, only to swear under her breath a half-second later. "I mean, no. We... haven't, I guess."

"You're in my class," Warren said, firmly. "AP Chemistry with Professor Grant. You're the one that sits in the back all the time."

She stared back at him for a full second before responding, obviously caught off guard. There was a kind of clumsiness to her that other people must've found endearing, both in her words and in the way she was fiddling with the pencil in her hands. It dropped from between her fingertips and hit the desk every few seconds, but she picked it up anyway, clearly nervous about the conversation.

"Sorry. I thought you looked familiar, but I didn't know where I knew you from," she said, her voice shaking a little. He was pretty sure she was lying to him, but he didn't bother to call her on it. "I'm Max."

"Maxine Caulfield, yeah. I know who you are."

"Please," she implored, "just call me Max. I can't stand the name Maxine."

He ignored the fact that she'd introduced herself to the class as Maxine on day one. Then again, she _was_ new at Blackwell. Maybe she was still trying to figure things out. It was her first year in the school from what he'd heard. That was, honestly, probably part of how she'd gotten into the Vortex Club so quickly. Nobody knew the embarrassing things in her closet.

"Okay. Did you come over here to introduce yourself to me for the third time, or did you actually want something?"

"I need a tutor," she blurted out, voice shaking again. It felt an awful lot like there was something else there, but he didn't really know what it would've been. She'd have probably brought Victoria if she were trying to mock him, and good ol' Prescock didn't look ready to jump down his throat from around any bookshelf corners. "For our class. Um... Chemistry, I mean."

" _You_ need a tutor."

"Yeah."

"For AP Chemistry? Why're you in the class if you can't do the work?"

"I... thought it'd be a good idea, I guess."

Warren exhaled and closed the book in front of him, leaning back in his chair so that he could slump up against it. She was fucking with him somehow, he just couldn't tell how. Maybe she'd ask to tutor him and then pull him into some cannibal cabaret with the rest of the VC. He'd heard stories that some people even died at their parties, so was it really all that far fetched to believe that they'd find a way to kill someone in private?

Still, if she were going to pay him...

"I'll pay you," she said, as if on cue. Maxine, er, Max, put her hands on the table and finally put her pencil to rest. "Ten bucks an hour, if you can help me tomorrow night."

"Tomorrow night's a Friday," Warren clarified, sounding a little surprised.

"Yeah."

Warren averted his eyes from her face, letting them wander over to where Victoria Chase was still talking to the librarian. She didn't seem to care much about the outcome of her friend's conversation. Maybe this _wasn't_ some kind of trick, but he still didn't trust it. Not at all.

Then again, money.

"Yeah, okay. I'll meet you in your dorm."

"Guys aren't allowed in the girls dorm," Max replied, blushing down at the table. "It's against the rules."

Warren fought the urge to laugh, turning his head to look at her with incredulity plain across his face. There was no way that _Maxine Caulfield_ , Stoner Queen of 219, was honestly afraid to break the rules.

"If you've got a better suggestion, I'm all for it."

"Your room, eightish."

"Girls aren't allowed in our dorms either," Warren said, sounding a little frustrated. "I get now why you need a tutor."

"Yeah, but Nathan's Dad owns the dorm," she replied. "I don't think I'll get in trouble for being on your side if I said I was just going to see Nathan."

"Alright, whatever. Don't be late."

"Okay."

* * *

"So you're really going to tutor Caulfield?"

"Yeah," Warren answered, not even looking up from his textbook. Stella wasn't too happy with his already-established arrangement to tutor Maxine Caulfield, which couldn't have been more obvious. She'd asked him like six different times to make sure he wasn't lying to her, and he was pretty sure that she'd texted Kate Marsh and Victoria Chase too. The fact that she was _still_ asking implied that she hadn't heard anything else, which was probably a good thing. "The Stoner Queen apparently sucks at Chemistry."

"I'll bet," Stella replied, jotting down a few words in the margins of her class notes. They were supposed to be reviewing for the Physics exam they had to take in about an hour, but they were mostly just using the time to subtly argue with each other. She didn't want him hanging out with anyone from the Vortex Club and he didn't really want her to be so into his business. "She's probably tricking you. Somehow."

"Cut me some slack. I'm not an idiot."

Stella didn't reply.

Honestly, the two of them were in their second straight day of pure argument. If Stella didn't let him relax soon, he wasn't really sure how he'd respond. She was his girlfriend and all, but it wasn't really one of those relationships that relied on a mutual need. It was more the fact that both of them were nerds and neither of them felt like looking for anyone else.

"If she were tricking me, she probably wouldn't be coming to _my_ dorm room. She didn't want me in hers at all."

"She probably didn't want a witness, Warren. You know Kate, she'd spill on you if you so much as stepped within ten feet of the girls dorm."

Warren scratched the back of his head, studying the absolute hell out of the numbers written in his notes and wondering exactly what he'd been thinking when he'd written them. They didn't have much to do with the lecture topic and he was pretty sure he'd been doing some calculations for the personal project in his closet.

"Yeah, because Kate's not going to notice her walking out after curfew anyway. You're not supposed to be out after six, but she's not leaving until like eight."

Stella huffed and went back to her notes, leaving the library markedly more silent than it'd been in the last ten minutes.

* * *

Warren stared at himself in the bathroom mirror from 7:32 to 7:46, trying to fix his hair up enough that it didn't look like he'd just gotten out of bed. He couldn't do anything for the bags under his eyes, which he'd earned from sixteen years of pulling late nights, but they didn't make him look like a hobo. The hair, though, jeez. He understood why Stella always carried a hair brush with her and kinda wished that he'd remembered to bring one to the bathroom with him.

Then again, he was pretty sure that he didn't even own a hairbrush. He didn't really need to fix his hair often. Most of the time it just fell the way he wanted it, but he'd been pulling on it for the entirety of his Physics exam. He should've paid more attention to the material instead of fidgeting around with his pet project, but he'd already made the mistake. Hopefully, he'd managed to scratch up at least a B. A C would tank his grade in the class and probably drag him down from an A.

"That'd suck," he muttered, running his hands over his smooth chin and making sure that he didn't have to do any last minute shaving.

He'd pulled on his darkest, bluest sweater (the one with the cool, sky blue stripe across it) for the night. It made his hair look darker and totally fit him like a leather jacket fit Vin Diesel, but he'd never ever admit to watching a Vin Diesel movie in his lifetime. Action movies were good and all, but watching Vin Diesel was like watching regular porn. There was nothing to say about it.

Beneath the sweater was a pair of navy jeans and some ratty sneakers (he couldn't fix that, new kicks were expensive). Honestly, he looked pretty good considering the fact that he was about to science someone. Assuming Caulfield didn't dip out on him or totally screw him over, the whole thing wouldn't be too bad.

He nearly collided with Caulfield at 7:52, while he was on the way back to his room. She was staring at the board outside of the bathroom, wearing a red t-shirt and some faded jeans. Her hair was about the same as it always was, bobbed down around her ears, and her eyes were stuck on a poster advertising Rachel Amber's supposed abduction. Nobody knew who put them up, but Warren swore he'd seen Mark Jefferson tearing a few down the other day.

"You're kinda early," he said.

"You're a lot happier sounding than yesterday," Maxine noted, turning toward him. Her hands clasped together over her Chemistry book and held it up by her face, wiggling it around. "Are you ready to get started?"

"Yeah, follow me."

Warren led her to the door of his room with, like, ten percent reservation. He hadn't cleaned up. She was still eight minutes early. That eight minutes would have been _crucial_ time for him to clean his room and keep himself from looking like a slob in front of a Vortex Club member (whose opinion he really care about, not really).

He winced when he pushed open the door.

His laptop was propped open on his cluttered desk, which sat beneath a window on the other side of the room. Clothes littered the floor around a basket beside it, obvious misses from the night before. Posters advertising the San Francisco Scholars Association were tacked up on his walls beside the likenesses of Bill Nye and Neil Degrasse Tyson. Likewise, photographs of Warren and Stella were strewn up beneath them, placed there by Stella herself the week before.

The bed wasn't made and his TV was still on (playing the an episode of Matt Smith's Doctor solving a World War II related mystery), flickering like a dying moth trap. Maxine didn't react to any of it, but her eyes did linger on Warren's TV for a second, as if trying to ascertain what episode he'd been watching before she'd come.

"Sorry it's a mess," he mumbled, throwing a few books off of his bed and grabbing the chair in front of his desk. He drew it up and then plopped down on his scattered covers, letting Maxine take the computer chair for herself. She sat down slowly, as if afraid the chair might break beneath her lack-of-weight, and watched him while he looked for their Chemistry book in the pile he'd just discarded. "AP Chem, right?"

"Yeah, AP Chem."

Warren brought the book up and put it down on his pillow, only to reach for it a second later when he remembered that he was about to need it. Maxine watched him work through the pile of books again and waited, patiently, for him to pull out a five subject notebook. Warren flipped it open to somewhere in the first quarter of its pages and folded it.

"What's your grade in the class now?"

"Um... A D, I think."

"Wow, no offense, but that's awful."

"Gee, Warren, thanks," Maxine responded, sounding a lot more brave than she had the day before. "I totally came to study with you because I don't need any help in Chemistry."

"You're gonna wanna watch that tone," he joked, unable to help himself. "I've seen things. Crazy, chemistry things. I could make a pipe bomb out of a potato."

"You're a real MacGyver."

He tried not to laugh.

She was still Maxine Caulfield, even if she suddenly wanted him to call her Max, and even if she _was_ in his room after dark making him laugh.

Warren sterned himself with a shake of the head and passed his notebook to her.

"Here's the lecture notes from last class," he said, changing the subject. "Did you get these?"

"No, I don't think I was there," Maxine said. He wasn't sure how she wouldn't know, but he didn't question it. "What are these even talking about? It's like it's written in Latin."

"It's - Max," he started. "Max, it's written in shorthand. If you try to take all the notes at once you'll just get overwhelmed by the info. That's part of the reason you always see formulas with parts like NaCl, or KCl. It's faster to write it that way, so you don't have to write out Sodium or Potassium Chloride."

"Oh, right."

"You _really_ suck at Chemistry."

"Well, I'm paying you twelve bucks an hour," Max mumbled, looking down at his notes with red creeping over her cheeks.

"If you really are this bad, I don't think I could take your money. Not that I don't want it, but I'd feel bad taking twelve bucks an hour from a girl that can't read. You might accidentally give me a hundred instead of a twenty."

"As if," she chided.

He saw her hand go out to smack him on the shoulder, but she stopped halfway and let it fall to her side.

* * *

Maxine ended up meeting him in his dorm the next Friday with her Chemistry book in hand. She showed up the time after that with a poorly hidden comic book behind her back (one of the Miles Morales Spider-Man issues) and a fresh bag of chips. He couldn't help but to think that she was trying to buy him out with comics and junk food. He couldn't help but to feel that it was _working_ , either.

He learned to call her Max around the third week she showed up, because calling her Maxine and getting corrected every time got pretty annoying after the second time it'd happened. Other people still called her Maxine, which he didn't get, but almost nobody noticed that he called her something else. Stella, of course, noticed, but that was kinda natural.

She did, after all, ask for updates on everything Warren did with Max whenever she came over for tutoring.

That made sense.

The buying his time with comics and food, that made sense too.

What didn't make sense was the fact that, aside from a few basic principles that were haphazardly beyond her grasp, she wasn't bad at Chemistry. She got how to combine formulas and balance equations, and she knew the periodic table pretty well. She even brought him a B on the last test she'd taken, proving that she really didn't need the help.

What didn't make sense, beyond all that, was the fact that she apparently needed him for something she didn't want to talk about.

"You're not as crappy at Chemistry as I thought," Warren said, adjusting the collar of his CW Flash t-shirt and leaning back against the wall behind his bed. Max fidgeted on the other side of his bed, which may as well've been her spot by then, and looked down at his covers for a second.

"Yeah, I guess," she responded, not very adequately.

Max pulled her flannel off and placed it on Warren's bedpost, turning back to the book beneath her with little interest. It was only then that he noticed how small she really was; how wispy, like the wind might blow her away on a bad day. Her arms, which stuck out like needles from beneath a gray shirt (with a rainbow colored cat on the front, no less), looked like toothpicks.

She looked so easily breakable that he wondered whether or not she'd already been shattered once before.

He caught himself staring before she did and pulled his knees up to his chest so that he could use them as a table. The two of them jotted down a few notes and shared the answers on Mrs. Grant's latest review sheet for the next ten minutes in relative silence. Only the sound of his TV, left perpetually on, filled the silence.

Warren waited until he caught her staring at the TV for the third time before he actually said anything about it. He'd seen her taking glances out of the corner of her eye before, but her chemistry work was solid and he'd never had much reason to question it. Now, however, he felt the compulsive need to question everything about her, as if it might somehow solve the mystery of the change in Max.

"You like the Doctor?"

"A friend of mine does," she said, averting her gaze from the TV and appraising him. Lights twinkled under her eyes like stars over the city and he forced himself to look down at his notes for a second. When he looked back up at her, she was still staring at him. "He's more into the science in it, though. He says it's all preposterous, but that's what makes it a good show."

"Your friend's got it right," Warren agreed.

Inside of his gut, something twisted; it was a strange feeling, like he was feeling something that he shouldn't have been feeling. It felt a lot like he was somewhere else, almost as if something were strange in that moment. Not wrong, but strange. He was missing something.

He shoved it down.

* * *

Their next tutoring session was spent in the Two Whales Diner, where one of Max's friends worked. Rather, it was her friend's mom, but Max never really cared about that distinction. She greeted Joyce (their waitress) like they were old pals and the two reminisced for a little while before Max remembered to introduce her to Warren, who shook her hand a little too tight and knocked a salt shaker off of the table with his other hand. Unbelievably enough, Joyce apologized and laughed, sweeping the salt off of the floor with a nonchalance that Warren hadn't expected.

By the time he placed his order (for a stuffed hashbrown with eggs and cheese) Max'd already gotten her food. She refused to touch it until his came, which he found a little weird. Her order'd been for a plate of pancakes, which she didn't seem to touch even when they actually started eating and studying.

She did, however, still manage to spill syrup all over her notebook. Warren moved to wipe it up and she moved to stop them and their hands brushed over each other's, bringing her to blush and Warren to spill his drink all over his notebook and it was an _inconceivable mess_.

"Woah, sorry, I dunno what happened there—"

"No, it's okay," she said, picking his notebook up off of the table. Soda dripped from every page and splattered all over the table, which Warren was trying his best to wash off. "At least you tried to help."

Joyce didn't even bat an eye when Max called for her to help them out. The older woman, blond and vaguely familiar looking, cleared the table and wiped it clean in under two minutes flat.

"You sure know how to pick 'em, hun," Joyce drawled, barely concealing a laugh. "Would you know we haven't had a spill in three months? Suddenly, you come back and everything just happens to fall apart."

Max laughed and scratched the back of her head, as if to apologize for the bad luck that followed her around like a cat chasing tuna. Warren waited until Joyce was back behind the counter to take his seat and broach the subject that'd been nagging him for the last ten minutes.

"So how do you know Joyce again? You two're, like, sisters or something," he said, trying not to sound invasive. He was being invasive; he needed to be nosy, to find out what it was that he knew he didn't know. "You said she was your friend's mom, right?"

"Yeah, she's... I'm best friends with her daughter," Max nodded, slowly fading back into the faux polyester of the booth seat. The lights above her flickered on and off, bathing the diner in the fake kind of glow reserved for dives and truckstops. She looked even more pale than usual beneath the light, having become a ghost in the moonlight. "She got into an accident while I was in Seattle. She can't walk anymore."

"Geez, that sucks," Warren breathed.

He noticed, through genuine empathy, that Max's face was twisted up with guilt in the same way that his mind was tangled up in her strangeness.

"Is she okay, though?"

"I mean, other than... yeah, I guess. She's been having a rough time lately."

Warren nodded and felt a guilt of his own welling inside of his guts. He didn't mean to be a downer, but he'd been so curious that it'd just come naturally. He stole a bite of her pancakes to melt some of the tension and grinned when she threw a forkful of it at his third favorite shirt. It slogged home right in the dead center of a large, blue beaker. Warren pulled off the pancake chunk with his hands and plopped it down on top of his already decimated hashbrowns.

"God, Max, I didn't know you were a pancake nazi," he tutted.

"I like that you're trying to make yourself Indiana Jones right now," she said. Her voice ran over with a bubbly laugh and Warren couldn't help but to share in it. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and shook it hard, activating the cracking whip app he'd had running in the background.

"I've come for the Skull, Colonel Maximoff!"

"That's not even a German name!"

He stole another bite of her pancakes for correcting him.

* * *

"You're spending too much time with her," Stella grumbled at him from his bed.

Warren, whose back was turned to her, finished typing away at his comment on a video and swiveled around to face her. He knew who she was talking about, but that didn't make the comment any less annoying. He and Stella'd been on the rocks for a while now, trying to climb up the cliff with no success. She was too nosy and into his business and he wasn't the type of guy to do something stupid like she apparently thought he was. What was it that she was even insinuating?

"I—I don't even know how to respond to that," he eventually replied. Was she implying that he was cheating on her or something? Or was she just getting the jitters because it was getting close to Christmas and she hated the idea of leaving him alone on campus for a weekend with _Caulfield_. Stella didn't even call Max by her name (either of them), and pretty much tried to ignore her whenever she wasn't complaining about her. "Do you think I'm getting frisky or something? I'm into science, but that doesn't mean I get hot to chem-labs."

"I don't know," Stella said.

Warren felt the stirring of genuine frustration rising in his gut. He hadn't felt that in a while; it was white hot and it devoured his reason. He wanted to yell at Stella, like it were her fault that they were fighting, but he held himself back. She didn't deserve to get snapped at for being suspicious. He scooted back over his carpet so that the back of his chair was against the wall and slumped forward.

"What're you saying? That's what I'm asking," he elaborated. "If you think I'm cheating, I'm not. I'm not that kind of guy, you know that."

"I don't know, Warren."

Stella exhaled and looked down at her phone, buried in it so uncharacteristically deep that he couldn't help but wonder if she was just trying to end the conversation before they ended their relationship.

"It's not like that," he said. He wanted to go join her on the bed, but he could see that she didn't want him anywhere near her. She sat cross legged over his covers, with one arm crossed over her chest and the other one holding her phone. Her hair, frizzled from having just woken up a few minutes before coming by, hung over the shoulders of his hoodie like string and tangled in on itself. "Not at all."

"I said I _don't know_ ," Stella hissed.

He let her get back to her phone and pulled his own out. There were a few unread emails hovering on his notification bar, along with a pair of texts from Max and one from Stella announcing her imminent arrival. He hadn't seen it, but he'd pulled an all nighter anyway, so he let her in pretty much the second he got there. He was now, of course, regretting that, but... it was whatever. He didn't know what he wanted any more than she did.

Warren opened the text from Max, sparing a glance in Stella's direction, and leaned back in his chair.

5:23 A.M. MAX: Hey, are you coming by to grab that DVD today?

5:24 A.M. MAX: I know you're up. It's only 5 AM.

He studied them for a second.

5:26 A.M. WARREN: Gimme 30. Stella's got track in like 10 minutes.

5:29 A.M. MAX: Stella does track?

5:30 A.M. WARREN: Is it the glasses? She's pretty fast!

5:32 A.M. MAX: The weed, lol. Don't they drug test?

Warren looked at Stella and picked himself up out of his chair. She fixed her glasses and brought her eyes up to meet his. He knew she'd smoked before, but for some reason, hearing that... _reading_ that _Max_ basically just told him that Stella was actively smoking pot pissed him off. He appraised his girlfriend, the woman he'd been dating for the last few months, with a strange kind of scornful interest. She didn't see it in his eyes.

"What?"

Scratch that, she probably saw it.

Nevermind, she definitely saw it.

"Nothing," he said. "I need to get a new poster for my wall. That one's getting a bit raggedy."

Stella turned to look at the FOR SCIENCE poster behind her and nodded. Its edges were worn and the text on it was scratchy, probably because he'd gotten it for a quarter the day he'd come to Blackwell.

"Whatever."

She went back to her phone and he turned his attention back to his, but made sure to exit the room. He had to pee anyway. A few minutes away from Stella would probably help him make sure he wasn't being a dumbass.

5:34 A.M. WARREN: Lol probs not, Maximus. How did you know she smokes?

5:36 A.M. MAX: She buys from Frank.

5:36 A.M. WARREN: That creepy dude with the dog?

5:37 A.M. MAX: Pompidou is cute! Don't hate on dogs!

Warren pocketed his phone and took care of his business in silence. A few of the lights in the hall were on when he stepped back out into the hallway. Prescott's door was slightly ajar and he could hear the sound of arguing thumping out from inside of it, meaning at least one other person was probably awake. That, or Nathan was up a lot earlier than he wanted to be and just didn't know how to deal with it.

Evan and Luke's lights were on too. Warren could definitely smell some weed poking through Evan's door. He didn't know they were friendly. He'd used to be friends with Luke and he was still pretty friendly with Evan, but he'd never been into the whole drug scene. He was still shocked that Max was into it; despite her title of Stoner Queen, she never really talked to him about drugs.

According to Stella and Victoria, however, Max was a regular blazer.

Warren skipped over Evan's room and went back to his own.

Stella was nowhere to be found.

5:42 A.M. WARREN: Be omw in a sec, gotta change and grab some food.

* * *

Warren crept into the girls dorm in silence, feeling skeevy about the whole idea of going there so early in the morning. A walk of shame was one thing (that he'd never experienced), but this walk was different. It felt like breaking into jail. Some things you just didn't do, and that was definitely one of them. Still, he trotted through the entry hall like a trooper and followed the little chart on the wall until he found 219.

The sound of a dozen girls snoring their heads off in Max's hall was easily heard over Max's weird hipster music, which stretched out from under her door with rays of light that signaled her presence. She was, obviously, awake. He'd have felt cheated if she'd fallen back asleep in the fifteen minutes it'd taken him to grab his stuff and get over there. Hell, he'd even grabbed her a pop tart from the box he'd had on his desk.

Sure, it was cherry flavored, but it was the thought that counted.

He'd been about to knock when the door swung open.

"Hey," she said.

She looked like she hadn't even _tried_ to wake up in the last half hour. Her hair was disheveled and she was still wearing a pair of boy shorts, not to mention the loose fitting Hot Dog Man tee that looked about a full size too big for her. Even her room looked like it was still getting up.

There was a couch, gold with red upholstery, on the left hand side that was covered in clothes. Her bed was opposite it and right beneath a collage of her photography, which Warren never really got but thought was cool. A desk with a tilted laptop on it lingered in the back right corner, right next to a wilting plant and a bookshelf that'd seen better days. It was like everything she had was a handmedown.

Warren slid past her and and put his bag down on her couch, right next to a guitar. He was still in the process of examining her room when she closed the door behind her and went over to her desk. She shuffled a few papers and books around on the top of it, obviously looking for something.

The DVD. She was looking for the DVD.

He'd let her borrow The Day of the Doctor a few days ago and she'd finally watched it last night, nerding out to him the whole time about how seeing three different Doctors in one episode was the trippiest thing.

"Oh, yeah, shit," she muttered, ejecting it from her laptop with a harried breath. She was obviously a little spazzier than usual, but it was kind of endearing to see her all burnt up in the morning. It was genuine. "I forgot I left it in there. I thought I took it out. Where'd I put the case, though...?"

Warren watched her scurry around the room, taking a seat on her bed and scooting up toward the wall. He wasn't in any hurry to leave. It was a Saturday anyway, so there wasn't much point in going to the main building. Stella probably wouldn't have bothered going to track if it weren't a compulsory thing to be involved in some extra curricular or another. Warren had the Sci-Fi club on Tuesdays and Science Squad on Thursdays.

Both were about as cool as they sounded.

When she finally found the case, he told her to go ahead and stow it in his bag. She unzipped it and snooped around for a second before actually depositing the case in the middle somewhere. Then, without warning, she yawned and stomped back over to her bed, practically collapsing face first onto it.

Stretched out before him like the Sahara, Warren sat with her while she woke up and they talked about the weather and the fact that Stella ran track. For Max, this was a scintillating discovery. For Warren, it was the bane of all scheduling initiatives. Track left Stella busy from three to five every day, and had her up too early on the weekends to do much in the night.

"I still can't believe that she's a long distance runner," Max said.

"I guess I'm used to it. I've known her since she moved here. She used to live with her family," Warren replied. "Not anymore, though."

Max nodded and rolled over onto her side. With a little maneuvering, she managed to sidle up next to him on the wall, and they sat like that for a while; her head rested against his chest and her arms slithered across his waist, attached like tethers holding him to the core of the world.

He wondered if she could hear the sound of his heart beating its way out of his chest.

"Does she really smoke?"

"I think so," Max said, wrinkling her nose. The question came out of nowhere and her disdain for it was obvious. "Victoria always talks about how much she hates seeing her at Frank's. Pompidou freaks out whenever she's around, for some reason."

"Stella probably freaks out whenever _Pompidou's_ around. She's allergic to dogs."

There was silence for another minute. Lyrics to songs he'd never memorize drifted from Max's boombox and kept him from closing his eyes.

Max shifted and Warren was made immediately keen of the fact that she was slowly burrowing her way into him. Her hands, which'd been wrapped around him a moment ago, pulled his arm over her shoulders and she nestled in close. Her body felt like it was going to drop away at any moment, and he didn't know how he felt about that. He wanted to pull her closer and shove her away at the same time.

Her hair, nuzzling his chin, smelled of strawberries and ocean water, as if she'd been out to the beach in the middle of the Winter.

He was distinctly aware that he was dangerously close to crossing a line.

"She told me she doesn't smoke anymore," Warren said, suddenly.

Max looked up at him. He refused to meet her gaze. There was something in his voice that even he could hear; it was a crack of uncertainty, the kind that came before a laborious decision that one wasn't sure he could make.

Droplets of cold rain pattered against the roof above without warning and the song on the boombox faded away, giving room to the silence of the situation. He could feel her eyes boring holes in him. Did she know how terrifying it was to be looked at like she was looking at him? It wasn't accusatory or anxious, it was _hesitant_. Like she wanted to tell him something but couldn't bring herself to force out the words, as if whatever she might say might fix his decision for him and keep him from having to say it himself.

"I think we're going to break up."

"I'm sorry."

Warren didn't know what to say, so he said nothing at all. Max buried her head back in his chest and brought her arms over hers.

"Is there anything I can do?"

"No," Warren replied. He didn't know why she'd asked. It wasn't her fault that he and Stella weren't compatible. "I don't think you've got anything to do with it, either. In case you were thinking it."

Her silence told him that she was.

He wished he had the power to rewind time, so he could go back and unread Max's text. He wished he could go back in time and fix whatever problems drove Stella to drugs in the first place. He wished he could go headbutt her dick of a father so hard that he got his shit together and actually showed his beautiful daughter the love she deserved.

He wished Stella wasn't a hypocrite and that he wouldn't find a baggy of herb in her pack the next morning.

Finally, he wished that he wasn't going to break up with his girlfriend a week before Christmas break.

* * *

Warren never did like Christmas all that much. The music was lame and the holiday was a hallmark one, meant more for spending money than for the actual spirit of things. That didn't stop Blackwell from celebrating it, though. In fact, all of Arcadia threw itself into the Christmas Spirit in the week before Christmas with a strange kind of unison. Even the Two Whales was decked out in boughs of holly and twinkling red and green lights.

The quad wasn't an exception to Christmas spirit either. Samuel'd decked out the grounds in lights and peppered mistle toes up everywhere. Samuel was a little weird, but he was a cool dude. Warren congratulated him on the scale of his decorations a number of times, but he made sure to do it again as he moved toward the Girls section of the Prescott Dormitory. Break was one of the few times where the students were allowed to cross over, due in part to the fact that Blackwell didn't have much security and in part to the fact that none of the teachers could be trussed to care about co-ed get togethers during the holidays.

Warren pulled his hood down off of his head when he stepped inside. His black jacket was both a pretty nice fit and super warm, despite the fact that it looked and felt thin. He was glad that he'd spent the money on it the year before last, and glad that he'd bought clothes to grow into rather than clothes to grow out of.

He could see Max's door open near the end of the hall. Kate's was tightly locked. Victoria's, across from Max's, was pretty much off the hinges. Both guys and girls that he did and didn't recognized streamed in and out to the tune of shitty Christmas jingles. He could hear Nathan Prescott's voice inside, shouting loudly about proper water bong etiquette.

"Just use regular glass," Victoria practically screamed back. It didn't sound like she was yelling at Nathan. Odds were that one of their guests wasn't adhering to the rules of their little miniature Vortex meeting. Warren's nose wrinkled up at the thought of going in there.

He was glad when nobody commented on his passing over to Max's room, but he was pretty sure that Victoria'd given him the evil eye for a long second on the way.

Max, contrary to her usual, was actually fully dressed. She had a pepper gray sweater on over a pair of khakis that made her look more like a mom than a high school senior. Warren pointed this out the second he walked in and got a smack upside the head for his quality sense of humor.

"Ouch, Max," he grumbled, patting the snow off of his jacket. It was pretty bad outside, but Samuel was doing his best to keep the walkways clear for the students who chose to stay over the holiday. It felt weird to know that he didn't leave the campus at any point during the year. It was almost like he lived there, too, which he probably did. Warren never thought to ask about it before, and changing that consistency now would ruin the mystery.

"D'you think you could give a guy a little warning?"

"You're one to talk," she said, rolling her eyes. "You just murdered my carpet, Warren."

"It was asking for it. Did you see what it was wearing?"

Max pulled out the sarcastic jazz hands.

"Ohh, beige. Yeah, my carpet's just too alluring."

He didn't even have his coat zipper halfway down when she put her hands on his to stop him. A jolt shot through his body and he froze, forced to look down at her doe-eyes.

"Not yet, Graham. We're stopping in at that Christmas Party."

"What? Victoria's Christmas Party? The one with all the weed and the booze? I could smell everything from the boys dorm," he said, practically groaning. "C'mon Max, don't make me go in there."

She pouted.

He caved.

The two of them crossed the hall together, stepping into Victoria's room with the same kind of halfhearted tiptoe that a child would use to sneak up on a cookie jar. Victoria practically skipped to the door when Max stepped inside of her room, which was at least twice the size of any other Blackwell room. Students sat on the floor and a futon couch stretched out over the left wall. A taller guy, Logan probably, was passed out on a soft looking bed, covered in royal red cushions in the back right corner.

The thick, pervasive scent of weed pretty much staggered him when he walked through after Max. He'd never smoked before, but he was pretty sure that whatever they had in there was some dank shit.

"Maxine!"

Victoria pulled Max into a tight little hug and led her by hand to the circle on the floor, where a number of students were fondling a piece of glassware.

"Graham," Prescott said his name from his place in the circle. "Hit those lights. Left switch up, right switch down."

Warren did as he was told.

The normal apartment lighting of Victoria's room cut off and found itself replaced by the thin glow of twinkling Christmas lights. Edelweiss (an EDM remix of it, anyway) kicked on over the radio and the small circle of students cheered. Warren only recognized Victoria and Nathan. He was pretty sure that the burly looking dude on Nathan's left was Zach Riggins, though. Zach was pretty much the world's biggest douchebag.

The piece of glass glowed in the dark and reflected the flames of at least six different lighters while Warren watched the circle move. Smoke drifted out from between loose lips and stuck in the air, filling the hall with the scent of teenage spirit.

He felt uncomfortable about the whole thing.

He wasn't a smoker. He'd just broken up with Stella for lying to him about being a smoker. He didn't belong anywhere near the Christmas Party on Victoria's floor, but he watched it with a morbid curiosity. The glass passed from Nathan to Victoria and then to Max, who wiggled a little in anticipation and stared down at it. It looked, for a second, like she'd never even a bowl before.

Then she turned to Warren, gestured for him to come over, and scooted to the right a little so that he could sit down beside her. Victoria, contrary to his expectations, scooted left and pulled Nathan with her, making sure that Warren felt welcome.

Warren sat down and watched Max take a hit off of the bowl. She pulled in slow and smooth, only to exhale with a long, drawn out breath that dragged the smoke from her lungs. It dissipated in the air and joined the growing cloud, and for a second, he was worried she'd pass the bowl to him. Instead, she passed it to the right. He paid close attention to it, surveying it with growing amounts of anxiety, as it slowly swirled around back to Victoria. She whispered something in Nathan's ear and he whispered back, looking a little disagreeable.

He considered getting up and running right then and there, but Max put a reassuring hand on his shoulder and a little bit of the stress melted away.

"So," Victoria said, pertly. "Graham."

"Maxine tells us you've never smoked before."

"Never really been my thing," he replied, glancing over at Max. She nodded back at him, as if urging him back to Victoria.

"She's also told us that you've been having a rough time lately."

She let the words hang in the air. Some douche across the circle let out an obligatory "yeah!"

"You're about to get super blazed, Graham," Nathan laughed.

"I don't know how to use a bowl, man," he said, pointing at the glassware in Victoria's hands. He didn't feel comfortable with any of this.

"Don't worry about it," Victoria said, placing a hand on his shoulder. She brought the glass up to her lips and Nathan lit the weed inside for her. She took a long, long drag and turned to Warren.

She beckoned him forward with a slender finger, encouraging him to close the already small gap between them. Warren scooted closer, just a little, and she leaned in toward him. Her lips met his with so subtle a crash that he might not have noticed if not for the gasp that went up afterward. Victoria, her lips pressed tightly to his own, used her free hand to prop his chin up and exhaled into Warren's mouth. He drew in the smoke and fought the urge to cough and sputter and cry and burn inside.

He coughed anyway, pulling away from Victoria and practically chucking his lung up. He felt like a thermobaric bomb'd gone off inside of his chest, lung-pull and all. In the moments it took him to reorient himself through his coughing fit, he noticed three things.

One, Victoria looked unbelievably smug.

Two, Max's cheeks might as well've been cherries.

Three, he couldn't stop coughing.

He choked on the smoke for at least a full minute more. Tears came to his eyes and he pounded at his chest, trying to forcefully dislodge everything he could. He didn't hesitate on passing the bowl without bringing it up the second it came back to him. Max, he noticed, passed as well. She turned to him and placed a gentle hand on his back.

"I'm sorry," she whispered. "I didn't know she was going to do that. I can take it back—"

Warren shook his head.

"No, I'm good, Max, I'm okay."

"Did you like it?"

Victoria's question hit his ears and faded away, probably because of all the blood pumping to his head. The coughing was over, but he was still feeling the burn in the back of his throat and his eyes were still watering.

"I don't... I don't know," he mumbled, hoping that she mistook his furious blushing for an aftereffect of his coughing fit. He hadn't been given a chance to prepare for that, but he should've seen it coming. Max's hand rubbed circles over his back and he grew silent, wondering why Stella even bothered to smoke pot in the first place and wondering what Max saw in it.

He didn't feel better or less stressed or more relieved. In the minutes that came next he felt more empty, like he'd been drained of his backbone. The bowl passed over his lap in a quickly dancing circle and the music bombed in and out while the THC took hold. It was strange, the feeling; he couldn't explain it. It wasn't good or bad, but it was something different that he didn't know about before.

Max took the bowl from him at some point and packed it. She took a short hit and passed it on to a girl he didn't recognize, then stood up and dragged Warren out of the room with her.

"I'm sorry," she said again, leading him to her room. "I didn't know she was going to do that, Warren. I thought she was just going to ask you if you wanted some. God, Victoria can be such a bitch."

He'd never heard Max so angry before.

It was sort of precious. It was like she was a rowdy puppy in a gif on the internet, barking like crazy when someone took her milkbone away. Warren suppressed his laugh and followed her through the threshold into her bedroom. They left the door open and Warren stumbled over to Max's bed. He sat down with a little bit of effort and exhaled a clear breath.

Whatever they'd given him was pretty strong. He could feel _that_ at least. Then again, it probably would've been impossible not to feel it. The Vortex Club bought from _Frank._ Warren knew only two things about Frank: that he was both the biggest drug dealer in Arcadia Bay and that he had a dog named Pompidou, and the second thing wasn't exactly common knowledge.

Max leaned down and put a hand on Warren's shoulder, examining his face with an almost motherly concern. He could smell the weed on her breath, as pervasive as it was in Victoria's room.

He took that moment to memorize every part of her face; the freckles and the way her bangs fell and the look in her eyes when she was so obviously worried about him. Warren's breath caught in his throat and he struggled, in that moment, not to kiss her. Everything in him was screaming to smash his lips against hers and pull her down on top of him, but she held back and he wouldn't dare move.

The two of them stayed like that, drifting closer in place for what seemed like an eternity.

Her lips were chapped and her hair was a boyish mess, but when she kissed him that all seemed irrelevant. Lightning absolved him and set his nerves ablaze, burying him in an avalanche of lethargy that pulled them both down onto the bed. His head bumped against the wall behind them, but he didn't care.

Maxine crawled onto him and hovered over his body like a child afraid of falling into the water. He could see the doubt on her face, like she was doing something irrevocably wrong; he could see it playing in her eyes like a wildfire, hungry for the feeling but afraid to spread.

He reached up and cupped her face with his left hand.

They stilled.

Then they fell into each other.

His left hand left her face as she sank down on top of him, juxtaposing her hips over his and straddling his waist line. Their lips crashed like sinking ships and parted anew with every roll of the tide, bidden by Max's hands holding Warren's face for dear life. Warren's fingers, like skeptical dancers, came to rest on her hips and buried themselves in the fabric of her sweater.

There was a feeling there that he hadn't felt before. It was a desire to lose himself in her the same way she was losing herself in him out of what must've been nowhere, because he hadn't felt anything like that feeling before and her lips were predators against his. It wasn't until she drew back for breath that Warren spoke.

"Max," he breathed.

"Warren," she replied.

"I'm..."

"I know."

She brought her lips back down on his and drew back to peel off her sweater like it were wrapping paper in the way of their sudden desire. Warren watched her throw it across the room and let his eyes follow after it for a naive second, as if it would come back and he'd realize that he was still in the other room. When he turned his gaze back to Max, in her slim, white t-shirt and khakis, he wondered how he'd managed to resist for so long.

There was a mystery in her that he couldn't place and that he still hadn't figured out.

He could see it beneath the surface of her eyes and in the way she deigned herself to kiss him, bringing their lips together in the form of two well-shaped pieces of the same puzzle. He could feel it in the sound of her breath, quick and harried, between the strikes of their lightning.

For now, though, the mystery was gone, figured out in the process of exploring her lips and the skin beneath her shirt, discovered somewhere between breaths.

In that moment, despite the open door and the words they couldn't bring to say to each other, they were alone with themselves.

That, Warren figured, was all they needed.


End file.
